Robber-Barons

 

Robber-barons essentially rule the world. From China to Russia to Japan to India to Europe to America, there are phony businessmen everywhere you look. These dictatorial billionaires rob mankind blind.

These ultra-thieves are created by government monopolies of one sort or another. The criminals use the state to seize control of some extremely important product or service, so that if the public wants it, as they almost always do, they have to go to the robber-barons. On top of their exclusive economic niche, many or most of the oligarchs also receive government subsidies, import protection, and bureaucratic regulation to keep down competition. There are many possible names for this planet-wide system of economic tyranny and theft: crony capitalism, phony capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporatism, fascism, princely capitalism, corrupt capitalism, counterfeit capitalism, criminal capitalism, klepto-capitalism, tyrannical capitalism, and more.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton claimed, "The era of big government is over." This was largely based upon the 1980s liberal revolutions led by Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, and Deng Shiao-ping in China. It was also based upon the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991.

To many, the 140-year war between capitalism and socialism seemed to be over. Individualism-based economic choice had won and collectivism-based economic coercion had lost. From now on, evidently, it was freedom for all and tyranny for none.

Socialism had supposedly been both intellectually refuted and politically defeated. So now capitalism was going to take over the globe. As American intellectual Francis Fukuyama put it, it was "the end of history".

The future would consist solely of political free enterprise, free trade, and laissez-faire business activity. And along with this economic liberation would come social and personal liberalism. As Milton Friedman put it in 1980, we were all going to be "free to choose".

Of course, none of that happened. The post-1991 worldwide welfare state grew bigger and nastier than ever. This is because however much people wanted and needed individual liberty, the finest economic, social, and political theorists of that era understood freedom and individualism about as well as an aardvark understands calculus.

And under the advice of their illiberal, nitwit, dirtbag, Western brothers, the backward Chinese, Russians, Indians, and everyone else "liberated" their societies by selling off government businesses and granting economic monopolies to the politically connected and criminally corrupt. Virtually never were these giant commercial interests sold freely and honestly to the highest bidder with the proceeds going to the people. And as these new and terrible plutocrats were created in the East, the Western robber-barons of the past three decades expanded their power and wealth too.

So here we are. This is Planet Oligarchy. Outside of relatively small pockets in the West, there’s hardly a single legitimate billionaire anywhere. They virtually all have government regulation, protection, and monopoly on their side. These coercive advantages let them steal and dictate on the grand scale. These robber-barons bribe the rulers almost without limit, and often effectively become the leaders too.

Capitalism is nowhere to be found. Liberty has no national home. And the greatest geniuses and heroes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and the like still understand economic, social, and political liberalism less than the poor aardvark mentioned above.

Crony "capitalism" is the political system found in every nation on earth. And robber-barons pretty much rule the whole world.